What could we know differently if we understood sweat as vocabulary, sound as empowerment and voice as archive? These are the questions I consider in this work which focuses on Black embodied experience in Berlin which I explore through a Black feminist lens. I take this approach to make visible the ways in which the sensory and embodied dimensions of experience can be read as more than sensation. Here I argue that they are an embodied grammar which if we learn to read can tell us something of ourselves as well as something of the society and the moment in which we live.

‘Black ways of knowing and being’ are essential to my understanding of racialized experience therefore I weave quotidian experiences of racism and racial othering with practices of joy, healing and space making or what Katherine Mckittrick has called “Black livingness” (2020). This notion of ‘liveness’ is vital, as within the current discourse Black life is often narrated as one always precarious and under siege. Realities which shape the practices of individuals and communities, but which are not the totality, rather a dimension that has become synonymous with Black life within white dominant societies. This work seeks not to negate these realities, but to approach multiple aspects of Black experience in Berlin through the lenses of the spatial, visual, and embodied and in doing so illustrate the complexities of how we move through the world and how we challenge, refute and co-exist with racial norms that are structurally and socially oppressive. This work recognizes that in returning to the body and viewing the experience of race through the prism of encounters, be they visual, spatial or embodied does a new politics emerge, a politics which brings into view the way in which the body speaks.